Author Profile

Allen White

Allen is a Practice Leader for Upsearch in Northeast Ohio. He's been both a developer and an administrator so understands both perspectives towards database technology, and loves sharing his experiences and helping people learn how to use SQL Server. Allen has spent over 35 years in IT and has been using SQL Server since 1992 and is certified MCITP in SQL Server and MCT. Allen has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP Award for the last six years. He's President of the Ohio North SQL Server User's Group and maintains a blog at http://sqlblog.com/blogs/allen_white/default.aspx.

The best way of checking SQL Server backups is to restore them and run DBCC CHECKDB on the restored database. To do this regularly means that you need to automate the task. Allen White shows how, with PowerShell.Read more...

If you run a regular and comprehensive inventory of all the servers you manage, you can solve problems more quickly and answer most questions from management. If you then repeat these reports over a time period, it helps to to track trends such as disk space usage so you can spot trouble before it becomes a problem. Allen describes a PowerShell script to do the inventory.Read more...

Allen White shows how to use Visual Basic to create simple routines that use SMO for inserting and deleting jobs from SQL Server Agent and for creating or deleting stored procedures in SQL Server. Read more...

Part 2 of Allen White's "SQL Server Automation" series demonstrates how to use 'performance condition' alerts for more effective database log backups during periods of high database activity.Read more...

The most important thing you can do as a database administrator is perform regular database maintenance. This includes regular backups, database integrity checks and optimizations. In Part 1 of a three article series, Allen White shows how to automate the backup of all of your databases, using SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) and either native backup or Red Gate's SQL Backup tool.Read more...